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Saturday, July 14, 2012

Here is another reason, out of thousands, to not cast a vote for Romney.

Mitt Romney is promising (threatening?) that if elected president, he will not fill his Cabinet with these punk-ass academics and politicians. No, no, no. If you want to run a government to the exclusive benefit of Wall Street and corporate executives, then that's who you put on the Cabinet. Why have a middle man between Wall Street and the president?

"It would be a very different lineup than the president has assembled. His team is almost entirely void of anyone with any experience in the business sector, in the private sector, that understands how the economy works," Romney told Medved. "I will assuredly have members of my team who have had experience in the real world, in the private sector… It will have a number of people who have been out working real jobs so they understand what it takes to keep real jobs in America and to have real jobs coming back."

The only thing that is real to Mitt Romney is the profit motive. The idea that government should maybe have some motives other than private profit for the wealthiest is foreign and illegitimate to him. And in many cases this "real world" experience that Romney so valorizes comes from Wall Street, a sector in which a new survey finds that 24 percent of executives "said they believed financial services professionals may need to engage in unethical or illegal conduct to be successful" and 30 percent "said their compensation plans created pressure to compromise ethical standards or violate the law."

It makes sense, though. If Romney wants to demolish environmental and safety regulations, why not stock his administration people who have spent their careers avoiding and lobbying against those regulations? If he wants to break unions, why not have the Department of Labor and the National Labor Relations Board run by executives who've spent their careers trying to break unions? If he wants to gut consumer protections and constraints on Wall Street's ability to wreck the economy again, why wouldn't he be guided by the people who did all that the last time around? The policies Romney is proposing and the people's he's proposing to implement them are entirely consistent. And both are aimed at destroying the economy as people who have to work for a living experience it.